Extract from Dave Ruel’s article “A Look At Ediscovery Challenges With Gmail Data”
Organizations that use Gmail for business communications need a way to preserve and extract discoverable information in the event of litigation. But that’s easier said than done.
In the first post of our three-part blog series, we discussed why Gmail is an important data source for modern ediscovery. Today’s blog post will detail why Gmail data can be difficult to preserve, collect, and review.
The Two Primary Challenges of Extracting Discoverable Data From Gmail
Naturally, there are ways to get to Gmail data, collecting and exporting it for use in discovery review platforms. For example, users can access their Gmail data through Google Vault—but doing so raises two major challenges.
Managing multiple-source holds.
Organizations that manage litigation matters across multiple sources need ways to streamline and simplify their legal hold and data collection workflows. Those organizations must grapple with the following:
- multiple holds spanning different sources, all pending at any one time;
- multiple custodians per hold; and
- multiple channels of information to manage per hold, ranging from email accounts and Google documents to online SaaS data, information in collaboration platforms such as Slack, and online databases and tools such as Google Workspace, among others.
The more tools you need to manage your various data sources, the more tools you need to learn to use—and the more interfaces you need to juggle with each hold or data collection.
